A blog from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Department of Justice, Peace & Human Development. Inspired by Pope Francis.

CCHD: Helping Immigrant Families Participate Fully in American Life

The following excerpt is from a speech given by Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento, Chairman of the USCCB Subcommittee for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

Bishop Jaime Soto, Chairman of the USCCB Subcommittee on CCHD

[The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) seeks] to have immigrant families participate more fully in American life. Becoming a good citizen is not just a matter of a naturalization process. It is a matter of learning the personal responsibility – as well as the skills that go along with this – to be involved in your community. In time, faceless institutions become real people: the mayor of your town, the principal at your school, the police chief in your city and the local Congress member for your district.

More than just advocating for a just comprehensive immigration reform, CCHD has supported efforts on a variety of related issues both on local and state levels… helping immigrant communities better relate to local law enforcement, responding to local anti-immigrant ordinances, organizing community-based humanitarian responses to immigration raids with special attention for children separated from their parents.

All of these efforts are as much about the empowering of relationships, practicing subsidiarity, and enabling the virtue of solidarity as they are about the practical outcomes of promoting better laws.

One very important aspect of these efforts is enunciated very beautifully in Pope Francis’s recent apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, “The Joy of the Gospel.” He spoke about time being greater than space [EG, 221-237]. . . . The Holy Father expressed a concern that all too often there is a priority of space over time, a desire to control the exercise of power for intended outcomes, refusing to let the processes of dialogue and participation produce a more authentic human development. The inclination is to believe time is running out or to fear what time could harbor. So, using the Holy Father’s language, there is the temptation to take possession of the “spaces of power” in order to hold back any process. Does this not sound like the language with which sovereignty is being used today in order to build higher walls instead of better bridges?

Time has to do with hope, living with the expectation of a brighter horizon. Hope is more than an expectant feeling. Christian hope incarnates itself in time, using time to bring about the kingdom, carefully, deliberately – quoting Pope Francis: “without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity” (EG, 223). He used an apt metaphor from the Gospel, the parable of the weeds and the wheat. The workers wanted to take control of the situation, pulling out the weeds. The owner of the filed, fearing the wheat could be lost with the weeds, counseled time, patience. His wisdom allowed the field to develop and grow so that at the proper time a good discernment could be made.

The work of solidarity takes time, patience, and process or development. The work of CCHD understands this. Our efforts to begin with the poor and the marginalized, giving them the time to create the space of hope where they can share in protecting and providing for one another, creating a cohesive narrative and using power for the common good. We put resources and power where we believe it can do the most good.

Perhaps this is where time helps solidarity create a new sense of sovereignty that is not enslaved in a sense of space. The political probabilities for a comprehensive immigration reform are still uncertain, murky. The work of CCHD will continue to engage immigrant communities in the political discourse not because a favorable outcome is assured. It is not. Even in the face of little optimism there is the hope in things still not seen (Rom 8, 24-25).

Along with this hope is the freedom to act. We insert that hope into time, creating citizens of the New Jerusalem. This is a hope not held captive by partisan timetables, strategies for the 2016 campaign or talk-radio slogans. Rather, “soon and very soon, we are going to see the king.” Pope Francis spoke about the constant tension between fullness and limitation (EG, 222). CCHD will continue to fund that tension, desiring always that his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

Bishop Soto’s speech on “Sovereignty, Solidarity and Time: Reflections on CCHD’s Work With Immigrants,” was given on January 25, 2015 at the 32nd Annual Aquinas Lecture sponsored by the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, MO. The full text of the speech appeared in Origins, CNS Documentary Service, Vol. 44, No. 37, February 1, 2015.

For stories of how CCHD works to help immigrant families participate fully in American life, visit the Poverty Map and select “Target Population.”